Buckwheat Love

So the other day, I bought a small bag of Bob's Red Mill organic cracked buckwheat (marketed as "creamy buckwheat") thinking I would make porridge for breakfast and use the rest in a rustic bread. Maybe because I grew up eating buckwheat crêpes regularly, I have a huge fondness for blé noir (literally black wheat) as my grandmother used to call it (the other name being sarrasin) and as it is still called in half of Brittany and I was looking forward to a new buckwheat experience.
Well, I was disappointed: not only did the cracked buckwheat boil into a solid clump but it had no taste at all. To the point that it ended up in our little dog's food bowl (she didn't seem to mind, maybe because I added a non-inconsiderable amount of shredded chicken and sweet potatoes). In any events it had a very positive effect on her innards which had been rather scrambled because of her unbridled passion for sand crabs (we walk her on the beach most days and she treats it not only as her personal race track -which is good- but also as an all-you-can-eat sushi bar -which is less beneficial to her health).
Anyway I had buckwheat on my mind in a generally dispirited sort of way when French chef and pastry chef Philippe Conticini was invited on On va déguster, one of my favorite French weekly food radio shows, and I heard him describe, among other things, a topping he makes with buckwheat and hazelnut meal. Unlike the other recipes the chef shared on that day, this one was pretty simple and I jotted down the reference, thinking it could come in handy.
A few days later I got an interesting oat chocolate crumble recipe in my mailbox from Smitten Kitchen, a blog I love not only for its food but for also the verve, energy, humor and otherwise sheer New-Yorkishness of its author, Deb Perelman.
The recipe called for pears. That caught my attention. A dozen big organic pears had been ripening on the counter for the better part of two weeks and I knew they were about ready to eat. I was idly trying to remember if we had any oat flakes left over from the last time I made granola when the Conticini buckweat topping popped into my mind. Bingo!
Next thing I knew, I was caramelizing pears and grinding cracked buckwheat into flour. When all the ingredients were ready, I put the caramelized pears in an oven dish, covered them with a layer of unsweetened frozen raspberries, added dark chocolate chips and a generous sprinkling of buckwheat topping, and into the oven it went for about thirty minutes. I won't lie by saying it came out gorgeous. In my experience, melted chocolate always looks iffy under a toasted surface but it smelled divine and tasted even better, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.

For 5 or 6 people

Ingredients 

For the fruit base

• 4 ripe pears, peeled, cored and diced
• 60 g sugar
• 60 butter 
• 200 g frozen raspberries
• 1 teaspoon of corn starch

For the topping
(makes way more than you need for this recipe but can be refrigerated and used on other desserts or even on oatmeal or yogurt)

• 100 g buckwheat flour
•  50 g salted butter
• 50 g brown sugar
• 65 g hazelnut meal
• 2 generous pinches of fleur de sel (or regular coarse sea sal

Since Deb explains in details how to make the fruit base and the process is pretty straightforward, I won't go over it again. As suggested, I added a teaspoon of cornstarch to the caramelized pears to thicken up the juices a bit. If you do that, remember to mix the cornstarch with some cold liquid first. (I took two tablespoons of pear juice out of the pan, added an ice cube until cool, removed the ice cube, mixed in the starch and put the whole thing back in with the pears.)
The recipe for the buckwheat topping being given in French, I'll run it by you in English: basically all you have to do is mix the buckwheat flour, butter, salt and hazelnut meal in the food processor until you get a finely granulated powder, toast it for a few minutes in a frying pan until satisfyingly blonde and fragrant. Et voilà, you have a dessert that's both reasonably healthful and decidedly decadent. Enjoy!

World Bread Day 2012: Pear and Spelt Bread

Today is World Bread Day 2012 and to celebrate the renewed interest in artisan bread-baking throughout the world, I am happy to participate in the bread roundup with this flavorful Pear and Spelt Bread from Hanne Risgaard's gorgeous book, Home Baked - Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry. The recipe is on page 142 and originally titled "Pear and Sourdough Bread." I adapted it slightly, using freshly milled whole spelt instead of sifted spelt flour and no commercial yeast at all (the recipe calls for fresh yeast).

We share a pear tree with our neighbors and even though the tree is technically in their garden, they kindly let us pick the fruit on their side of the hedge as well as ours. I make jam and jelly as well as galettes and crumbles and we all share in the bounty. This year, I received Hanne's book when the tree was at its most prolific and I knew I had to make the bread. What a treat! 

Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Related post: Pear-Chestnut Confit

I don't often write about non-bread magic but I must share with you this visit to Solange Couve, jam-maker extraordinaire who lives with her husband Stéphane (whom we didn't get to meet as he was away visiting his mother), her dog Victor and her two cats, Lulu and Lily, in a remote corner of the Ardèche department in south-central France. From the highway it takes about 45 minutes and hundreds of steep curves on very narrow roads (we were glad to be traveling on a holiday when traffic was sparse) to reach the farm.

New vistas opened up with each turn in the road and if it had been possible to stop more often (alas, opportunities to just get off the road and admire the landscape were few and far between), I could have taken dozens of pictures, all different. It's easy to understand why so many of my French friends rave about vacationing in the Ardèche backcountry.

Like Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the farm is literally located at the end of the road.

The farmhouse has remained pretty much as it was when Solange and her husband decided to make it their permanent home 27 years ago. The sink has remained the same, the doors and walls were repainted in their original colors and the volumes were not altered.

Solange and Stéphane happened upon the farm one day while traveling in the area and fell in love with it at first sight. It then belonged to two elderly sisters who, as it turned out, were only too glad to sell and move away. The surrounding land had been left idle for 20 years although some of it was being farmed by neighbors. The couple led a busy life in Paris where Stéphane was a dentist with a thriving practice and Solange, who was a real estate agent, spent her week commuting from the capital to central France and to Corsica. In other words, they mostly saw their new house as a destination point for downtime.

After a few years however the pull of the farm became too strong to resist. Stéphane sold his practice and bought a new one in the Rhone valley, about 45 minutes away. As for Solange, she decided to forego real estate and to become a farmer. Now for that dream to become reality, two things needed to happen: the land had to be cleared up (a process which involved an enormous amount of manual labor) and Solange needed to acquire notions of agriculture. Not a woman to be easily deterred, she enrolled in an agricultural studies program in Valence and spent a year learning everything there was to know about trees: how to plant and prune them, how to take care of them, etc. When that was done, she spent another year learning about food-processing to find out all she could about sugar chemistry. An overkill, she soon realized, for someone whose only aspiration was to learn how to make jam properly. But Solange is nothing if not thorough and she forged ahead.

Meanwhile the land had been cleared and planted with close to 4 acres of fruit-trees. Since the Ardèche is raspberry-heaven, Solange also planted 2.5 acres of raspberry bushes as well as red and black currant bushes. For the first 10 years, she produced on average 6 tons of raspberries a year and sold them fresh to the local cooperative. Then the raspberry bushes were hit by some illness and had to be ripped out. She decided to diversify.

Using no other ingredients than fruit (pears, apricots, peaches, quinces, berries, etc.) from her land and sugar, she started producing more than 5 tons of jam a year which she sold mostly to luxury hotels and restaurants and to high-end grocery stores and bakeries as well as to fruit and vegetable markets which offer a small artisanal product section.

Since she had kept the chestnut-trees (the Ardèche is famous for its chestnuts) which were on the property when they bought it, she embarked on a trial-and-error learning process which taught her how to turn her chestnuts into delicious marrons glacés (candied chestnuts), crème de marrons (chestnut spread) and purée de marrons (chestnut purée). She also learned how to make pear-chestnut confit, an exquisite concoction which can be served with a brioche as a light dessert at the end of a holiday meal or poured over fromage blanc (soft curd cheese). As soon as she mentioned it over the phone, I knew I wanted to learn how to make it and report on it on the blog (after all, it could tempt you to make a brioche to go with it!).

Today Solange is semi-retired. She has kept her workshop (located about 2 miles away from the farm) but she only works for a few luxury hotels and restaurants on the Côte d'Azur and in the Alps as well as for family and friends. She still makes marrons glacés and other chestnut delicacies, including the confit, but she no longer sells them (too much work). I wish I could describe in details the lunch and dinner ardéchois she prepared for us and the extraordinary breakfast that awaited us in the morning featuring grape juice from her own grapes, no less (they grow on the vine that shades the big table just outside the kitchen door), but it would be off subject. Suffice it to say that Solange loves to cook and that her imagination is bottomless when it comes to extracting as much flavor as possible from the fruit and vegetables she grows on her land. We were awed!

Pear-Chestnut Confit

Related story: Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Chestnuts are abundant in the Ardèche where they are used in a variety of dishes, some sweet and some savory, and even in bread. To make this confit, Solange uses chestnuts from her own chestnut-trees.

She also uses pears from her orchard (she only grows Williams pears). The ones she uses in this particular dish are the last of the season and she has saved them for the demo. 2010 hasn't been a great year for pears: last year the pear-trees yielded a huge crop of very big pears but this year, they struggled to produce fewer and much smaller fruit. Still the pears seem marvelously fragrant and juicy to me.

For this recipe, the pears are first peeled...

... then cooked in syrup until they become translucent.

As for the chestnuts, they are cut horizontally in a circle, then boiled briefly to slightly loosen their two layers of skin. Once peeled, they are cooked in boiling water before being added to the pears. Preserved chestnuts in syrup can also be used, whether home-made or store-bought.

Solange uses a special knife to cut through the chestnuts but as demonstrated in the video below, a regular paring knife can also be used.Previously, when she was processing her chestnuts for commercial purposes, she had them peeled in the village by an artisan who uses a less labor-intensive technique: he places the chestnuts inside a rotating cylinder perforated with many small holes and uses a flame-thrower. The flames lick the outside of the cylinder, burning away most of the skins. The chestnuts are next dipped in water then placed on a rolling mat where the remaining skins are removed by hand. The perfect ones can be used whenever a recipe calls for whole chestnuts whereas the other ones are puréed and used in other recipes.

Solange says that it is best to let fresh chestnuts dry out a little as they are easier to peel if they have shrunk a little. Store-bought ones are usually somewhat dry already, so this step can be skipped. Since the skins are easier to remove when the chestnuts are hot, it is almost guaranteed to be a challenging exercise and caution is de rigueur. If one isn't really partial to burned fingers, it is best to use chestnuts preserved in syrup as a less hazardous alternative.

Ingredients:

1 liter of water

400 g crystallized sugar

10 pears

10 big fat chestnuts (or their equivalent in broken pieces)

1 vanilla bean (from Tahiti if available)

Method:

1. Peel and cook the chestnuts as described above. Solange cautions that the chestnuts need to be peeled while still hot as their skin starts to stick again when they cool down.
2. Heat water in a medium-size wide and shallow pot (to facilitate evaporation) and add the sugar
3. Slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the tiny grains into the syrup, then add the two halves of the vanilla bean to the pan
4. While the syrup is boiling, peel and core the pears and cut them in quarters
5. Plunge them delicately into the boiling syrup and let them simmer. Refrain from handling them as they cook. To avoid breaking them, do not flip them over
6. When the pears are translucent, gently add the chestnuts with some of their cooking water and let the syrup thicken again
7. Pour into jars when done. The confit will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge. To extend its shelf life, it is imperative to sterilize the jars, a precaution that Solange takes systematically. She places all her jars in a big pot, covers them with cold water, then bring the water to a boil and lets the whole thing boil at 176°F/89°C for 15 minutes. None of her jars has ever spoiled.

Unfortunately my version of iMovie doesn't allow me to add subtitles or I would have done so. But I can at least tell you what Solange is saying in this video clip (and please excuse my use of the French word "translucide" for "translucent" in the spoken dialogue. After two weeks of complete French immersion, I clearly had a hard time switching my aging neurones to English!).

• When adding the pears to the syrup, make sure they are completely immersed and let them simmer
• When preparing the chestnuts for peeling, cut through both skins all around. It is a bit hard to do but but when cut that way, both skins loosen simultaneously in boiling water.
• Using a chestnut knife makes cutting the chestnuts in a circle a bit easier but a regular paring knife can be used as well
• It doesn't matter if the cut penetrates the flesh of the chestnut
• After peeling, the chestnuts need to be cooked before they can be added to the pears
• Add some of the chestnut cooking water to the syrup in the pear pan, so that it can thicken again without caramelizing
• It doesn't matter if the chestnuts crumble when added to the pears. In fact if using preserved chestnuts you probably want to break them a bit at this point.

Hazelnut Cake with Pears & Ginger

I think I need help. I truly do. I mean, my life is being taken over by the things I make. Just look at the wild yeast starter for instance. It requires to be fed twice a day. Each time I feed it, I can only keep a small portion of it and the rest, well, the rest has to be either thrown out or used, right? And if I decide to use it, it's now or never. The wee beasties won't wait. Not even one hour. When they are ready, they are ready. Either you put them to work or they kamikaze into oblivion, turning embittered and nasty along the way. So I have no choice. And it's eating me. I don't have either the time (I am back out of retirement working full-time until mid-December) or enough hungry mouths to feed (even though I do have a fair number of those, counting immediate family, friends and neighbors), to bake every single day. But I hate to throw food away. I just hate it. So the other day I made the sourdough chocolate cake from the King Arthur website. It came out voluptuously plump (I didn't even have time to frost it, it went out to my daughter's house in its birthday suit, demurely cloaked in confectioner's sugar, and pff! it was gone, no picture, sorry!). It had been so quickly put together that yesterday I decided I might as well make another cake. See how easy thrift entraps you in its twisted logic! However, since I was being virtuous (making a cake we didn't need to save wild yeasts we didn't need either), I decided to take stock and look around. What else did I have to use in a hurry before it turned on me? Three pears which were definitely starting to look like they were ready to go over the hill, some fresh ginger which was shriveling under my eyes and a pint of creamy homemade yogurt (which was perfectly fresh as I had just made it the day before but which I also had to find a use for, right?). I also had a big jar of hazelnut butter that a friend brought me from France a few months ago and I looove the taste of pears with hazelnuts and ginger. So here is what I came up with! Totally haphazard (hey, I even forgot to put eggs in) but it worked! It's going out tonight to some friends. Maybe I'll be able to sneak a slice back home. My starter is back on timeout in the fridge, so I won't be baking tomorrow. Too bad...

Ingredients (for one 9x9 square cake and 11 hazelnut-ginger babycakes): (if you are making just the cake, use half of all the ingredients except the first four) 15g butter, melted 25g light brown sugar 3 Bartlett pears, peeled, cored and sliced 50g candied ginger, sliced or chopped 240g mature sourdough starter (hydration: 100%) 12 g ground ginger 2 inches of fresh ginger, peeled and grated 12g baking soda 260g wholemilk yogurt 130g hazelnut butter, smooth (can be replaced by another roasted nut butter) 100g agave syrup 225g all-purpose flour 225g low-fat powdered milk, reconstituted 1 pinch of salt pieces of candied ginger to top the babycakes (optional) Method:

1. Heat the oven to 375F/191C making sure the lower rack is in
2. Put melted butter in the cake pan and rotate to spread evenly
3. Dust with brown sugar
4. Arrange the sliced pears on top
5. Put the pan in the oven, bake for 20 minutes and take out of the oven
6. Chop or slice candied ginger on top of the pears, pushing it with a teaspoon into the pear syrup at the bottom
7. Meanwhile, gently fold all the other ingredients into the starter and mix well
8. Pour the starter mixture into the pan until three quarter full
9. Pour the rest (if using) into muffin pan paper liners, sticking a piece of candied ginger on top of each babycakes
10. Bake at 375F/191C for 40 minutes (checking during the last 10 minutes that the cake or babycakes are not browning too fast. If this is the case, tent some foil over them. The cake and babycakes are done when a tester comes out clean.
11. Let the cake cool for a few minutes in the pan on a rack
12. Then, before the juices at the bottom have time to set and stick, turn the cake upside down on a plate.
13. Let it cool completely before eating.

Enjoy!

All these babies are going to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting. Thanks, Susan! I love Yeastspotting. It's a wonderful way to bring us bakers together...

Pear & Roquefort Babycakes

The recipe for these delicious babycakes comes from Craquez pour les moëlleux salés!, by Isabel Brancq-Lepage, a yummy little book which I bought on my latest trip to France. I changed almost nothing, except that I used 30% white whole wheat flour instead of all all-purpose. Next time, I may even go 50 or 100% white whole wheat and see what happens. Roquefort is an expensive cheese, I know. They used to carry it at my local Costco many many years ago but no more... Now I get it from time to time at Trader Joe's as a special treat for the family (our 15-year old grand-daughter is crazy about it, especially when spread on a slice of baguette!). To my mind, there is a special affinity between the taste of sheep milk and the taste of pear but other cheeses might work just as well. For instance, if I could find here Saint-Agur, a lovely blue cheese made from cow milk, I would definitely give it a try. Let me know if you experiment and come out with other flavor combinations. The babycakes look like muffins but they contain no leaveners (no yeast, wild or otherwise, no baking powder and no baking soda). Yet they are airy and light. They are great for lunch with a green salad but, sliced, they are lovely for the apéritif with a glass of Prosecco and...they are quickly put together, which never hurts, especially during the work week.

Ingredients (for 9 babycakes) 1 firm pear 90 g Roquefort (or other blue cheese) 50 g grated Swiss cheese (I used Jarlsberg) 3 eggs 70 g unbleached all-purpose flour 30 g white whole wheat flour 20 g milk (I used unsweetened almond milk which is all I had) 20 g sliced roasted almonds (optional - chopped walnuts can also be used) Pepper (according to taste) but no salt (the cheeses provide it, especially the Roquefort) Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 410F/210 C
2. Beat the eggs as you would for an omelet in a big bowl, slowly add the sifted flours and whisk with a fork until incorporated
3. Heat the milk in a saucepan on the stovetop, add the Roquefort and the grated Swiss cheese, stirring with a wooden spoon until the cheeses melt
4. Let the milk-cheese mixture cool down a bit and slowly pour it in the flour-egg mixture
5. Stir well
6. Peel and slice the pear and dice it into the bowl
7. Pour the batter in the muffin tray, using liners if you like
8. Sprinkle almond slices on top
9. Put in the oven and bake for 20 minutes or until golden
10. Allow to cool before unmolding.

These babycakes go to Susan, fromWild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Drunken Ciabatta

I loved the taste of fermented apples too much in this bread not to try again at the first opportunity. This time, I had not only apples but a few pears that were decidedly past their prime. I peeled and sliced the whole lot and set it to marinate for 5 days with some water and a sprinkle of sugar. Then my guests from France arrived and with them, a whirlwind of sightseeing and no time for baking. So I stuck the fermented mixture in the fridge where it rested for a week.
When time came to travel with our guests to our summer cabin on the St-Lawrence river, I packed the whole thing into a glass jar and took it with us in the cooler. Meanwhile I had finally developed my very favorite ciabatta recipe and started making it almost daily to satisfy multiple hungry stomachs here on the river. That gave me the idea of incorporating the fermented fruit (which tasted deliciously boozy) and its juice in the dough to make a new and inebriating breakfast bread. The Drunken Ciabatta was born.
For ingredients and method, please refer to the ciabatta recipe below.
I used all the leftover apples and pears I had (about 4 of each, i.e. 684 g after peeling and coring). I sliced them up and put them to macerate with 100 g sugar and 84 g water (I would have used organic apple or pear juice if I had any at hand but I didn't). I covered the bowl and left it at room temp for one week, stirring it vigorously once a day.
At the end of the process, after fermentation and straining, I had 380 g fruit and 406 g juice.
I replaced most of the water in the ciabatta by the fermented juice (I didn't have quite enough to replace it all) and I incorporated the fruit at the very last moment when the dough was already well developed and hydrated.

The taste is out of this world, so much so that I now have standing orders (from family and friends) for all kinds of fruit ciabattas. The next one will be blueberry. Stay tuned!
The Drunken Ciabatta goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Essential Sweet Perrin (Pear Bread)

Si vous préférez lire ce billet en français, cliquer ici

Those of you who have access to Maggie Glezer's excellent book, Artisan Baking Across America, where I got the recipe, will realize right away that this isn't the way the bread is supposed to look.
For those who have no way of checking it out, here is the way it is (or was) made at Essential Bakery in Seattle - the bakery which contributed the recipe to the book :

(photo scanned from the book, frame and text added by me)

I love their presentation too and I'll probably make the Sweet Perrin that way one day, especially around the holidays when it would make a lovely present to bring to someone's house. But for this once, I wanted to give the bread a pear shape.

Except for the shaping and the use of pureed canned pears in lieu of a jar of pear baby food (which would have required a trip to the supermarket), I pretty much followed the recipe as indicated.
When I make it again though, I may skip the cinnamon as we are not huge fans of that particular spice (maybe because the taste of cinnamon as we know it in the United States is more assertive than the one we grew up with in Europe).
Save this restriction, the bread is truly lovely. The raw pear bakes inside the bread and when you bite into it, it yields an explosion of sweet and fragrant juice in your mouth. The hazelnuts add a welcome crunch. The figs contribute a marvelous depth of flavor. The cracked rye gives the crumb a chewy texture and the white whole wheat and high-extraction flour make it tastier and more wholesome. A good bread for the Man to bring to the office as a snack, which is why I made it!
Ingredients:
For the pre-ferment

• 175 g unbleached bread flour
• 175 g water
• 1 tiny pinch of instant yeast

For the soaker

• 17 g cracked rye
• 17 g water

For the final dough

• 300 g hi-extraction flour or unbleached bread flour
• 40 g white whole wheat flour 
• 1/4 tsp instant yeast all of the pre-ferment all of the soaked rye
• 120 g water (I had 34 g leftover)
• 80 g pear baby food or pureed steamed or canned pears (if canned, preferably with no added sugar)
• 12 g salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 115 g very hard crisp pear such as Bosc or Anjou, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch cubes
• 60 g dried figs, stemmed and cut in 1/2-inch pieces (the recipe calls for Calimyrna figs but I used the regular Trader Joe's ones as it was all we had on hand)
• 60 g hazelnuts (lightly toasted and skinned) (to toast the hazelnuts, put them in a small baking pan in a 350 F/177 F oven for about 15 minutes, then rub the warm nuts in a paper towel to remove the skins)

Method: (Glezer gives instructions for 3 different mixing methods, by hand, by stand mixer and by food processor. I used a mixer with a dough hook). This bread is made over 2 days.

1. The day before, scale the yeast and the flour for the pre-ferment, add water and stir well. Cover and let ferment overnight or about 12 hours (Glezer says to use instant yeast and to mix it in water before adding it to the flour/water mixture but I wonder if that's not a typo as, from what I understood, only fresh and active dry yeast should be added to water. So I just proceeded as usual and mixed the instant yeast with the flour before adding the water)
2. Also the day before, combine the cracked rye and the water in a small bowl until well combined , cover well with plastic wrap and let soak overnight for 12 hours
3. The day of the baking, combine the flours and yeast in the mixing bowl, add the pre-ferment, soaked rye, water (I saved about 20%, some of which I managed to add later in the mixing and some of it I just couldn't use as the dough looked already very hydrated. Of course the raw pear made it even wetter. If I had used all the water indicated in the recipe, I probably wouldn't have been able to give the loaf the shape I wanted) and pear puree and mix just until smooth
4. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest (autolyse) for 20 to 30 minutes
5. Add the salt and the spices to the dough and knead on medium speed until very smooth (about 5 minutes)
6. Remove the dough from the mixer and incorporate the figs and hazelnuts by hand until evenly distributed
7. Incorporate the raw pear pieces (I did that last as the dough becomes very wet and pretty tricky to handle once you do it. Maybe the pear I used was too juicy even though it felt really hard to the touch)
8. Place the dough in a bowl as least 3 times its size and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Let it ferment until airy and well expanded (but not yet doubled in bulk), about 3 hours
9. Flour the surface of the dough and the worktable and turn the dough out
10. Pre-shape lightly in a ball (Glezer says that at this point, you should cut the dough in half and make two loaves but I had drawn a rather large pear stencil, so I didn't divide the dough for fear that my stencil would end up being too big)
11. Let the dough relax about 15 minutes
12. Give it a pear shape (click here to see a photo tutorial of the shaping method)
13. Let proof about 1 1/2 hour minutes in a large well-sealed clear plastic bag, or until the dough is well expanded but still springs back when gently pressed with a finger
14. At least 45 minutes before the dough is fully proofed, arrange a rack onto the oven's second-to-top shelf and place a baking stone on it as well as a shallow metal pan on the shelf below
15. Preheat the oven to 375 F/190 C at least 45 minutes before baking time
16. Remove the loaf from the bag, and stencil it if/as desired
17. Make small vertical cuts all around it
18. Just before baking, pour a cup of water in the baking pan (taking care to protect your face and hands)
19. Put the loaf in the oven, spray the oven walls with water to create more steam
20. Bake until the bread is evenly browned, about 40 minutes, rotating it halfway into the bake
21. Let cool on a rack.

The Sweet Perrin goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting .